A Key Ingredient in Success? Failure, Says CDC Head

The head of the Centers for Disease Control (pictured above) advocates tracking treatments’ failures as well as successes.

Thomas Frieden, who runs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discussed the importance of failure in his talk at TEDMED on Wednesday as a way to keep researchers, doctors and public health officials accountable.

In the private sector, he said, if a product doesn’t work, it fails.

For the government or similar entities, however, if a program doesn’t work, money often keeps flowing in through grants or other funding mechanisms to sustain it.

Without a feedback loop, says Frieden, you won’t know if you’re making a difference and you won’t succeed.

Frieden gave an example from his experience as health commissioner of New York City.

When he arrived, the city didn’t have good ways to track the health of its residents. Once it established a system, the numbers showed that smoking rates in NYC had been largely static for a decade.

So the city set out to curb smoking. The first year the city raised the tax on cigarettes — the No. 1 way to reduce smoking rates, says Frieden — by $1.42 per pack. Indeed, there was a big decline in smoking that year.

The second year, the city banned smoking from office and indoor venues. But when they saw the tracking data that May, they found that the rate didn’t decrease, and in fact rose slightly.

“We had stalled; we were failing,” said Frieden.

After seeing the numbers, he reached out to the CDC for advice and started a series of antismoking ads, as they suggested. “I was skeptical,” says Frieden. But, the smoking rate declined that year.

Comments (3 of 3)

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1:25 pm April 17, 2012

war horse wrote :

Right or all those idiots who thought people could fly in some kind of machine. Fools!

7:24 pm April 11, 2012

Stella Baskomb wrote :

"In the private sector, he said, if a product doesn’t work, it fails."

I guess he means, like when Thomas Edison tried more than 1,000 different filaments for the light bulb before finding one that worked?